Features

This is what stress-free parking will look like in the future: pull up, step out of the car, pull out your smartphone, and use an app to tell your car to go park.

This future will arrive in Aachen before the year is out, when the new parking garage for the production engineering cluster on the RWTH Aachen campus, built by Immofinanz in 2018, is equipped with Bosch automated valet parking.

It’s been called the “Davos for logistics in e-commerce”, and Robotics and Automation News is very pleased to be an official media partner for the event.

Davos is, of course, the mountainous place in Switzerland where every year the world’s most powerful and influential leaders from politics, business and other sectors meet and discuss the future of the world.

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A lot goes into making a SEAT vehicle, including an intricate dance routine. The show starts at five in the morning in the sheet metal workshop in Martorell, when 2,000 robots and 1,700 factory workers begin moving in unison to build a car body in just over one minute. This is how an Industry 4.0 choreography is performed.

Thousands of articulated mechanical arms weave in and out in synch to handle up to 2,300 parts daily. They work in harmony and in continuous movement for 24 hours on end.

Their abilities include welding different body parts, assembling car doors and verifying the geometry of the chassis with precision measuring instruments.

Information technology has become an integral part of our lives whether it be in the consumer, industrial or commercial aspects. It is hard to imagine life, work or entertainment without it. And artificial intelligence presents the next digital frontier of the IT evolution.

New research suggests ‘Robotics-as-a-Service’ (RaaS), where robotics providers rent or lease their products with solutions to customers as a full service, will be the next stage of market development.

ABI Research estimates that the installed base for RaaS will grow from 4,442 units in 2016 to 1.3 million in 2026. The yearly revenue from RaaS providers is expected to increase from US$217 million in 2016 to nearly US$34 billion in 2026.

“This will make the yearly revenue of RaaS providers (including all payments for services) greater than the shipment revenues for industrial robots, which currently accounts for the lion’s share of the robotics industry in terms of revenue,” explained Rian Whitton, Research Analyst at ABI Research.

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South Korea, Germany and Singapore are the world’s top-ranked nations in their preparations for smoothly integrating intelligent automation into their economies, according to an index and report released today by ABB and The Economist Intelligence Unit.

The report “The Automation Readiness Index (ARI): Who Is Ready for the Coming Wave of Innovation?” finds that even the best-prepared countries must develop even more effective education policies and training programs, as well as place a new emphasis on continual learning over the course of a career.

Those policies and programs, the report recommends, must ensure that the rapid adoption of automation technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will not leave people unprepared for the new, more human-oriented jobs that will be needed as robots and algorithms take on more of the routine tasks that can be and will be automated.